'It's all in the timing" has been a cook's maxim ever since Mrs Beeton was reminding readers that, when making mayonnaise, "patience and practice, let us add, are two essentials for making this sauce good".

But for the modern TV chef, good timing means so much more than merely choosing the best moment to add oil to a beaten egg yolk. Take Sophie Dahl. The model/novelist kicks off a new cooking series on BBC2 tonight called the The Delicious Miss Dahl. Some critics have noted that the show promises little more than reheated Nigella – "indulgently luscious recipes", as the BBC blurb says, delivered in a sensuous style more than a little reminiscent of Lawson's own seductive presentational method.

But the real star of the show is set to be its preposterously perfect kitchen, which just happens to be the centrepiece of a house in north London currently on the market for £1.45m. It is exquisite timing for the owner: not Dahl, but the photographer Paul Massey from whom it was rented during two months of filming last year. Cue fawning articles in property supplements of the Sunday papers. Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward, the estate agent charged with selling the house, says the timing is "coincidental", but welcomes it nonetheless.

Should cookery fans feel cheated to discover that the gorgeous kitchen wasn't Dahl's own? It is, of course, de rigueur nowadays for celebrity chefs to present their recipes from their own command centres of domestic perfection. Delia Smith has been giving out culinary tips from the kitchen of her Suffolk home for more than three decades. But the late 1990s saw a noticeable ratchetting up of the "designer lifestyle" dial. Jamie Oliver's first couple of series saw him sliding down banisters, parking his Vespa in the hall, and dispatching bruschetta and banter to his mates in his hip, stripped-pine east London flat. (He owned it for the first series, but rented it from the new owners when filming the second series.) Oliver has also gone on to present shows from his country home, complete with outdoor pizza oven. Nigel Slater, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein and Gordon Ramsay (who has cooked to camera on his £67,000 two-tonne French Rorgue stove) have also all used their own kitchens as TV sets.

However, an agent for celebrity chefs says that "the majority of chefs will use a hired venue", and Lawson not only makes but takes the biscuit with her decision in 2007 to mock up her Belgravia home in a studio on an industrial estate in Battersea. The embarrassing revelation forced the BBC to issue a statement: "This series is a factual entertainment cooking show, not an observational documentary."

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